The New York Philharmonic marks the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth with a three-week festival starting January 26.

It's been said that there are two kinds of music listeners, those who "get" Mozart and those who
don't. This writer would add a third category (which includes himself): those who were indifferent
to Mozart's music during their flaming youth, but now can't get enough of it. Listeners in all three
categories will find something to appreciate in the New York Philharmonic's three-week celebration
of Mozart's 250th birthday, The Magic of Mozart Festival,with three all-Mozart
programs in January and February.

Symphonies, concertos, and sacred choral works will beheard, and even this intensive
treatment gives only a glimpse of Mozart's vast musical imagination. However, the concluding
program offers a rare opportunity to hear Mozart's final symphonic trilogy‹the Symphonies Nos.
39, 40, and 41, the last known as the Jupiter Symphony‹performed in a single evening. "The
three symphonies, one after the other," says Philharmonic Music Director Lorin Maazel, "are a
statement that probably cannot be equaled by any other composer."

In addition to the festival concerts, Mozart's special place in musical
history will be explored in two Insights Seriestalks (see page 17): the first, the Annual
Erich Leinsdorf Lecture, given this year on January 24 by Mozart expert Neal Zaslaw, and the second
by Charles Zachary Bornstein, the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic.
Also, for neophytes, or anyone who wants to gain greater insight into Mozart and hear a concert,
musicologist and wit Peter Schickele will be the host and commentator on February 1, for the second
concert in the Philharmonic's new Inside the Music series.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in the small Austrian hill town
of Salzburg on January 27, 1756. As a child prodigy, he traveled the world with his family, performing
in the capital cities and courts of Europe. Later, at the urging of his father, Leopold, he revisited
many of those places as a young adult, hoping to associate with famous musicians and land a prestigious
job. In the end, the young composer did something much more modern: he moved, on his own initiative,
to the big city (Vienna, in this case), took a few pupils, gave a few concerts, and tried his luck as
an independent artist.

It worked. The musical art that Mozart had begun to learn as a little
boy and had developed as an ambitious and curious adolescent, now began to pay off. Performances
of his concertos, most of them featuring himself as the piano soloist, were among the hottest tickets
in Vienna in the mid-1780s. (Pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane will offer Philharmonic audiences
a taste of what that was like on the second program of this Philharmonic Festival.) Mozart's operas
were hits, the talk of the town from Vienna to Prague to Paris.

Mozart, who was by then a married man with children, spent too
much money and was always hard up, but that wasn't for any lack of success or public esteem. He was
among Europe's most admired composers when he became ill and died on December 5, 1791, at the age
of 35. At that time he was working on the Requiem, which bears the number "K.626" in Ludwig von Köchel's
catalogue of the composer's works.

Mozart's astonishing productivity recently caused Lorin Maazel
to reflect: "Most people think that they know Mozart, that they know the music of Mozart. But it is
a gigantic amount of music. All of us professional musicians are constantly astonished to stumble,
as it were, on yet another work of Mozart that we haven't heard and that we realize we should have heard,
because almost everything he wrote had that touch of genius."

So it is that, in addition to the familiar works of Mozart's glorious
noonday in Vienna, there are some other treasures‹such as the Coronation Mass in C major,
K.317, composed for Salzburg in 1779‹that are having their New York Philharmonic debuts during
this festival and on other programs throughout this anniversary season.

Philharmonic debuts? In 2005? The Mozart repertoire played
by symphony orchestras was limited during the 19th century by the public's tunnel vision, which
recognized only a half dozen Mozart "masterpieces." It was not until another century had passed
that specialized orchestras, devoted solely to the repertoire of Mozart's time, began to discover
his neglected works. The more "general" symphony orchestras, with a plethora of 19th-century
works to perform, avoided competing with such Classically sized ensembles, and tended to back
away from this music . . . until they discovered it for themselves.

So what's happening this birthday year? Well, the New York Philharmonic
will play a lot of Mozart's music, both during this three-week festival and on other programs over
the course of the 2005-06 season, because everybody has a right to feel, like Maestro Maazel, "constantly
astonished" at the riches in it.

David Wright is a former Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic.